A Commentary on the Passing Scene by
Robert Paul Wolff
rwolff@afroam.umass.edu

Coming Soon:

The following books by Robert Paul Wolff are available on Amazon.com as e-books: KANT'S THEORY OF MENTAL ACTIVITY, THE AUTONOMY OF REASON, UNDERSTANDING MARX, UNDERSTANDING RAWLS, THE POVERTY OF LIBERALISM, A LIFE IN THE ACADEMY, MONEYBAGS MUST BE SO LUCKY, AN INTRODUCTION TO THE USE OF FORMAL METHODS IN POLITICAL PHILOSOPHY.Now Available: Volumes I, II, III, and IV of the Collected Published and Unpublished Papers.

NOW AVAILABLE ON YOUTUBE: LECTURES ON KANT'S CRITIQUE OF PURE REASON. To view the lectures, go to YouTube and search for "Robert Paul Wolff Kant." There they will be.

NOW AVAILABLE ON YOUTUBE: LECTURES ON THE THOUGHT OF KARL MARX. To view the lectures, go to YouTube and search for Robert Paul Wolff Marx."

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Sunday, September 30, 2012

I can know that my
particular life cycle falls in a period during which the United States has become
the sole imperial power in the world.I
was born at a time when that was not so, and I have lived through both the
decline of the British empire, and the rise and fall of the Russian empire.I don't like the fact that the United States
is currently the dominant world hegemon;indeed, I would much prefer that there be no nation with that sort of
monopoly of military power.But it is a
fact, and pretty clearly when I will die it will still be a fact.I also know that I live during a time when
international financial capitalism flourishes and is unchallenged by any
alternative, another fact I regret but that I know will still be so when I die.

I know that income
inequality and social stratification have characterized the United States
during my entire life, and that by all measures that inequality has increased
rapidly in the last quarter century.But
I also know that this increase in inequality, which I view with great
disapproval, is in part the result of deliberate governmental policies that it
is at least possible to reverse.

I know that during my lifetime
a number of legal and social barriers to equality have been successfully
contested and to a considerable extent removed -- barriers against people of
color, against women, against gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgendered
persons.I know that the removal of
these barriers was the result of deliberate and forceful struggle, sometimes violent,
sometimesnon-violent.And I know that these social and legal
changes are still resisted by large segments of the American public who would,
if they could, re-impose the disadvantages and oppressions that struggle
eliminated.

Finally, and perhaps most
importantly, I know that major change, whether economic or social, results from
the organization of countless millions, not from the intentions, however
admirable, of the few.I know that
merely electing public officials who share one's goals or principles is never
enough, by itself, to effect salutary change.Electing those officials is the necessary, not the sufficient condition
of desired change. I know that during my lifetime, the most effective
instrument of collective action -- the labor union -- has been suppressed,
eviscerated, and disempowered, and I know that this too is the result of
deliberate governmental policies that it is at least possible to reverse.

All of these things I
know, and they narrowly circumscribe the possibilities that offer themselves at
this moment in my one and only life cycle.

What, then, must I
do?First, I must choose, in the words
of the old union song, which side I am on.[Which side are you on?, by
Florence Reece, 1931, written during the Harlan County coal miners' strike.]There is no argument that can establish with
objective validity the correctness of such a choice, Immanuel Kant and John
Rawls to the contrary notwithstanding.I
must decide who my comrades are as I live out the cycle of my life, from boyhood
to old age.I have made that
choice.I have chosen as my comrades the
exploited, the oppressed, the down-trodden, those who labor but are not fairly
compensated, those whose work creates and recreates the fabric of our society.As the Occupy Wall Street Movement would have
it, I chosen as my comrades the 99%, not the 1%, although that hyperbole
overestimates considerably the numbers of my comrades in the United States.

Having made that choice,
I must, it seems to me, do two things that may seem incompatible with one
another but in fact are inseparable parts of the same struggle.First, I must throw my support behind the
national political party farthest to the left that has a realistic chance of
winning national elections, which of course means the Democratic Party.That it has become a centrist party with
little of the working class bias and reformist thrust of earlier years is
deeply regrettable but a fact that must be faced.The failure of Obama supporters to turn out
in sufficient numbers of hold control of the House in 2010 unleashed an assault
on women's reproductive rights, indeed on women's sexuality, that was simply
appalling.A Romney victory, which
fortunately will not occur, would result in further devastation to the economic
and social needs and aspirations of those with whom I have chosen to make
common cause.

But an Obama victory
simply creates the possibility of the real work that must be done -- a ground
level effort, by millions upon millions of men and women, to strengthen labor
unions, recapture state governments, and organize to support any efforts that
have even the slightest chance of success to rein in the imperial ambitions of
America and the depredations of financial and corporate capital.

What may I [reasonably] hope?Not that I will live to see the socialism for
which my grandfather fought.That will
not happen in what is left of my life, and very probably will not happen in the
lifetimes of my sons, although I may at least go to the grave hoping that my
grandchildren will see that day, and will themselves fight to bring it
about.Nor may I reasonably hope to see
the end of imperialism in the world, for it is virtually certain that when
American imperialism passes from the world scene, as it will, another nation
will step forward to take its place as hegemon, one no more likely to place the
well-being of the billions of men and women over its own desire for world
control.

This is where I see the
world and myself in relation to it, as the years of my eighth decade wind
down.I do not think I can say, with
Wordsworth, that to be alive in the dawn of my life was bliss, nor that to be
young was very heaven.I came upon the
scene as the hopes of my grandfather were being dashed, and there have been
more disappointments than moments of triumph along the way.But there have been many, many life cycles
that offered less hope and more disappointment, and I imagine that after I
pass, there will be many more.

Professor Charles Pigden sent me the following long email reaction to the first half of my Meditation post. While I write the second half of that Meditation, I trhought I would post his message. Note that some software gremlin changes his apostrophes to question marks.Dear Professor Wolff,

A few months ago Brian Leiter started a thread on ?What would your biggest regret be if this were the last day of your life?? Unlike some others I took the question seriously, hoping to start a political discussion.I?m reposting it here because it?s kind of a propos.

Regrets, I?ve had a few but then again, not too few to mention ?

1) For fourteen years (1989-2003) I devoted a great deal of my time and energy to political activism, combatting the rise of the New Right in New Zealand, my adopted country. We achieved some successes, but it was a great deal of work for some very Pyrrhic victories. I did not neglect my students and I worked, at least, a forty-hour week at my official job. But it is difficult to be a high-achieving research philosopher if you only work the traditional forty hours. So during those years of political activism, my research career slowed, if not to a crawl, then to a very sedate walk. Between 1996 and 2006 I published no journal articles whatsoever (though I did publish an annotated collection of Bertrand Russell?s writings on ethics plus a couple of book chapters on the same theme). Since 2003 when I effectively resigned from my party (which had imploded because our leader preferred power to principle) I have published 50% more papers than I did in the preceding nineteen years. The result of all those years of activism is that I find myself in my middle fifties scrambling to do all the things that I have always wanted to do in philosophy before I run out of time, talent and energy. (So in a way, I DO regret the time I did not spend at the office.) I am also (though this doesn?t matter to me so much) a lot less rich than I might otherwise have been, since a lower research output led to slower promotion. I regret all the time that I devoted to politics at the expense of philosophy - or, at least, I regret the situation that made it seem necessary.

2) I regret that, along with the rest of my generation on the broad Left, I have done such a dismal job of defending the institutions of the social democratic state which handed us so many golden opportunities on a platter. New Zealand, the US, the UK and (I think) Australia are less equal now than they were thirty or forty years ago, with less equality of opportunity and less social mobility. Of course, the New Right is principally to blame, and some of us fought against it, but its stunning success in making the world a worse place must have something to do with our stupidity, cowardice, inaction and incompetence and the relentless way in which we have persistently barked up the wrong trees. We have failed not only as citizens and activists but also as thinkers, since we have not managed to articulate an intellectually effective opposition to the New Right?s ideas (one that resonates with the wider public). This is not the world that our mothers and fathers fought to create when they defeated fascism and voted for social democracy. And the fact that it isn?t, is at least partly our fault.

?3) I regret that in so far I have been politically active, I have devoted most of my political energies to what is really a side-show. By far the most important issue facing the world today is not the rise of the New Right per se but the threat of Global Warming. (Of course, the rise of the New Right has contributed to Global Warming and has helped to stifle attempts to do something about it, so there is some connection.) Global Warming is likely to bring about the deaths of hundreds of millions, perhaps billions of people over the next century, partly because of desertification and partly because of the drowning of populous and productive deltas. It might even lead to the collapse our civilization. And all I have ever done about this is write a few articles in the local paper and make a Quixotic gesture at the 2008 meeting of the AAP. It?s not enough, and if I believed in God I would dread his judgment at my combination of complicity and inaction.

As you can see my regrets don?t form a consistent set. I regret BOTH doing certain things and NOT doing them more (or more effectively). You might say that I don?t really regret my period as an activist but the political situation which I felt called upon to deal with. And perhaps you would be right (though I have certainly been a lot happier at the personal level since I gave up on my party). But it?s the second two regrets that are really important. For if you are roughly my age and of roughly my political persuasion, and if you DON?T, to some extent, share in my second two regrets, then the chances are that you are deceiving to yourself somewhere along the line. As a generation of intellectuals, we haven't done a great job. We have a great deal to be sorry for.

T-T-Talkin? ?bout my g-g-generation. Hard to do it without some shame.

Saturday, September 29, 2012

I apologize for my
relative absence from this blog in recent weeks.Part of the reason is the demands of my new
Bennett College job, which grow heavier with every passing day.When I began working at Bennett, I repeated,
as a mantra, that it was the hardest thing I had ever attempted.Little did I know how true that would turn
out to be.But a second reason has been
the evolution of the presidential race.In the past month or so, the prospects for the Republicans have grown
bleaker and bleaker, leading Obama partisans like myself to indulge in giddy
rehearsals of the mistakes made by the Romney camp and endless checking of the
steady growth in the polls of the Obama lead.Yesterday I officially marked the all but certain outcome of the race by
going to A Southern Season, the
ultimate yuppie food and kitchen store in Chapel Hill, to buy an extremely
pricey bottle of Chateau Neuf du Pape [sixty-eight dollars, for heaven's
sake!], which I plan to drink on election night as I sit in front of the TV set
and watch the results roll in.As I
remarked a few days ago, the pleasures of schadenfreude
are much underrated.

Now that an Obama victory
is all but certain, and even the fate of the struggle for the Senate seems to
have been pretty much settled [the House is quite another matter], I think it
would be seemly for me to stop reveling in the misfortunes of the Republicans
and start thinking seriously about what we are going to do on November
7th.A lengthy interview with Norman
Finkelstein, the link to which is provided in the previous post, crystallized this
thought in my mind.Herewith then is not
a plan or a set of marching orders, but rather a meditation, some reflections
on where we will find ourselves after the defeat of the Republican ticket.I take as the themes of my meditation
two passages.The first is a famous pair
of lines from a Wordsworth poem referring to the French Revolution:

"Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive,

But to be young
was very heaven!--

The second is a line from Erik Erikson's great book, Childhood and Society which I used as
one of the epigraphs of my Autobiography:

"An individual life is the accidental coincidence of but
one life cycle with but one segment of history."

Each of us lives for no
more than a few moments, and then we are gone.Even if I restrict myself to recorded human history, and set aside as
unfathomable the scale of geological time, my life is no more than the briefest
flicker in the ten millennia since the Neolithic revolution.It is just fortune, good or bad, whether I
happen to be alive during a time of great social progress, or am condemned to
live out my life in one of the many stretches of historical time during which
nothing uplifting or liberating happens.Something like that, I imagine, is what Wordsworth had in mind.Think how exciting it would have been to live
during the outbreak of the French Revolution, when centuries of encrusted privilege
and repression seemed to be crumbling before one's eyes and the head of
Europe's most powerful monarch fell into a basket.

During the nearly eight
decades of my life, there have been two moments of great hope -- moments when
it was possible to believe that great, positive advances were taking place in
America.The first, which I am not quite
old enough fully to have appreciated, was Roosevelt's New Deal.The second, during which I had the great good
fortune to be all grown up, was the period usually referred to as "the
Sixties," during which a great Civil Rights Movement transformed the lives
of Black Americans and irreversible social progress seemed all but inevitable.

The iconic moment for me
was a lazy Fall afternoon, October 10, 1973, when I sat in the lovely third floor
study of my home in Northampton, Massachusetts, watching on a tiny TV set as
the Mets won the fifth game of the playoffs to take the National League
pennant, the telecast being interrupted by spot announcements of the
resignation of Vice-President Spiro Agnew. Spiro Agnew's resignation would be
followed a year later by the resignation of President Richard Nixon."Bliss was it in that dawn to be
alive..."

But it was my portion,
dictated by the accident of when I was born, to live long enough to see the
frustration and defeat of those millenarian hopes and dreams.The Sixties were followed by the nightmare of
Reagan, of first one Bush and then another, of wars, assaults on the rights of
women, the dramatic expansion of America's imperial pretensions, the victories
of rightwing orthodoxy, the attack on science and the plain facts of nature and
society, and the complete disappearance form American life of even a memory of
the dreams of socialism.

I supported Barack Obama
enthusiastically because I believed he was the best this terrible time had to
offer, and that belief has been confirmed by the appalling lurch to the right
of the Republican Party in response to his 2008 electoral victory.I welcome with deep relief the prospect of
his re-election because I think his defeat would be a disaster for this country
and the world.

But I never indulged in
the illusion that Obama was a progressive liberal, let alone a socialist, and I
do not suffer that illusion now.My
life, as Erikson so wisely notes, is the accidental coincidence of but one life
cycle with but one segment of history, and for better or worse, it is in this
segment of history that my personal life cycle will come to its natural end.

So, echoing Immanuel
Kant, I must ask, situated as I am in this moment, and confronted as I am with
this world, What can I know?, What must I do?, What may I hope?

Tomorrow, I shall
continue this meditation and address these three questions.

Friday, September 28, 2012

Just about everyone, including me, has had something to say about Mitt Romney's "47%" statement to a bunch of fatcat donors, but there is one tiny point that struck me especially hard, and has not been commented on at all. To get the full flavor of this, it is not enough to read the transcript of the remarks, devastating though they are. One must actually listen to the intonation of Romney's voice at each point in the recording.

A "tell" is what serious poker players call that unconscious and revelatory bit of behavior that can be used to tell whether a bettor is bluffing -- see John Malkovich and Matt Damon in the great all night poker game in Rounders [Malkovich's tell is that he separates the two halves of an Oreo cookie and licks the filling off one of them. Malkovich, always a treat, is spectacular as Teddy KGB.] More broadly, a tell is any bit of behavior that gives us a window into someone's true beliefs or point of view.

The moment of revelation for me comes during the passage in which Romney says "All right, there are 47% who are with him, who are dependent upon the
government, who believe that, that they are victims, who believe the government
has a responsibility to care for them, who believe that they are entitled to
healthcare, to food, to housing, to you name it."

You cannot tell this from the transcript, but as Romney says "who believe that they are entitled to healthcare ..." his voice rises sharply on the word "entitled." There is incredulity in his voice, a sense of personal affront. The tone of his voice clearly communicates something like this: "Can you believe it? They have the colossal nerve to think that they are entitled to food, or healthcare, etc." This is the voice of a noble whose robe has just been brushed by the dirty foot of a commoner. It is the voice of an aristocrat in whose presence a serf has not tugged his forelock or doffed his cap. It is not anger, exactly. Rather it is an expression of disbelief that one of the lower orders could so completely violate the natural order of things as to presume to think that he has any entitlement at all to anything.

Google the remarks and listen to them again, and you will, I think, hear what I mean.

John Silber has died at the age of eighty-six, thus confirming Billy Joel's view ["Only the good die young."] Silber was trained as a philosopher, and early in his career he wrote several decent articles about Kant's ethical theory, one of which I anthologized in my 1967 book Kant: A Collection of Critical Essays. It is hard to imagine a person in whom the philosophical temperament was less manifest. Indeed, it was Silber who is responsible for the only time in my entire life that I voted for a Republican. He managed somehow to get the Democratic Party nomination in 1990 for the office of Governor of Massachusetts, and after much anguish, I decided -- correctly, I think, in retrospect -- that the Republican, William Weld was by far the less objectionable of the two.

There are many things to reproach Silber for, his homophobia among others, but it was in his twenty-five year long presidency of Boston University that he fully revealed himself as completely devoid of any comprehension of, or respect for, the guiding principles of Academe. He bullied the faculty, did everything in his power to destroy the faculty union, drove good people on the faculty to leave, and comported himself as a pint-sized dictator. [He also blocked my appointment to a professorship in the B. U. Philosophy Department, through his cat's paw, Jon Westling, but since in the end my failure to join the B. U. faculty worked out well, I do not hold that against him.]

Those of us in the Philosophy game like to believe that a serious engagement with our field of study will have the effect of leading us to wisdom as well as tenure, and though professional philosophers [an oxymoron if ever there was one] are not generally wiser or more possessed of the virtue of gravitas than those in other fields of academic work, they are generally a pretty humane lot. If one were to draw a curve plotting philosophical knowledge against common human decency, that tiny blip at the far end of the curve, completely removed from the general locus of points, would be John Silber.

Monday, September 24, 2012

Nate Silver, the
statistics guru who now writes for the NY
TIMES, is well aware of the fact that a sizable share of his readership
consists of freaked out junkies like myself who crave not merely daily but
hourly analyses of the upcoming presidential election.Since he rigorously confines himself to an
analysis of polling data, eschewing speculation or political commentary, he is
on some days hard put to come up with something new to satisfy our cravings.Today, for example, having nothing much
inthe way of new data to crunch, he devoted
an entire column to analyzing the extremely outré circumstances under which the entire election could
turn on the results in the Congressional District that includes Omaha, Nebraska.Nebraska is one of only two states [the other
is Maine] that award electoral votes by Congressional District, and in 2008, in
that overwhelmingly Republican state, Obama actually snatched a single
electoral vote from the sea of red by carrying that district by a single
percentage point.The odds of the
election turning on that electoral vote, by the way, are apparently a thousand
to one, but the Nebraska Republicans, stung by the insult to their purity, have
rearranged the district so that it is unlikely to occur again.

Another wonkish topic
Silver spent some time discussing is the tendency of some polling firms systematically
to tilt more toward one side or the other than the other firms that are doing
polling.Rasmussen, for example, can be
relied upon to tilt Republican.This
tendency is called by statistics nerds "the house effect" [for
reasons a quick Google search failed to disclose.]It is not that any firms actually cook their
data.Rather, the technique they use for
forming their sample or making their contacts has built in biases one way or
the other.

For example, pollsters
regularly distinguish between the universe of Registered Voters [RVs] and the
universe of Likely Voters [LVs].A poll
of RVs will tilt more to the Democrats than a poll of LVs, because the
sub-populations strongest in their support for the Democrats [Hispanics, young
people] are also less likely to turn out and vote than the sub-populations
favoring the Republicans [rich people, old people, white people].Silver has no patience with those who average
polls of RVs with polls of LVs.There is
also a good deal of disagreement among pollsters as to how one identifies LVs.

There are other sources
of bias, or a House Effect.Rasmussen
leans Republican in part because it calls people only on landlines.But young people, who tend to favor Obama,
are more likely to be reachable only on cell phones.

Since I obsess a good
deal about these matters, I got to thinking last night at one a.m. about other
examples of House Effects.One that
occurred to me concerns my life-long tendency to daydream.As readers of my Memoir will know, I spend a
goodly part of my waking hours in my head, daydreaming.Sometimes I daydream about having magical
powers, with which I correct much that is wrong in the world.I also do my share of daydreaming about
sexual conquests, of course.And a not
inconsiderable portion of my daydreaming is actually a form of work, in which I
give extended lectures to imaginary audiences as a way of thinking througha theoretical problem.On occasion, I write imaginary reviews of
books I have published.

I have noticed that my
daydreams exhibit a significant House Effect.They tend to biased in my direction.There are limits, of course.I do
not write reviews of my books that begin, "Not since Immanuel Kant burst
upon the scene has an author so stunned the philosophical world ...", but
the reviews do tend to be somewhat more enthusiastic about the arguments of
which I am singularly proud, and unusually forgiving of such shortcomings as I
am willing to acknowledge.

You might think that such
self-regarding daydreaming would, from the standpoint of a utilitarian
calculation, be a net minus, since the momentary pleasure from the imagined review
would be more than compensated for by the eventual pain of realizing that it
was only a daydream.But like Walter Mitty, I am undeterred by such
hard-eyed calculations.I have long
since become inured to the disappointments of reality, while remaining
enraptured by the enticements of fantasy.

There is one odd counter-example,
however,As I am now only fifteenth
months from my eightieth birthday, I have begun musing on the possibility of
throwing myself a big party on December 27, 2013.I thought maybe I would hold it in Paris
[which would have the effect of keeping the attendance within manageable
limits].I would invite everyone:family, friends, former students, colleagues,
everyone who reads this blog.We would
take over an entire restaurant in Paris and spend the evening celebrating -- me.But somehow, the prospect does not enchant.

I think the problem is
like that attendant upon the fantasy of being present at your own funeral.You can count on the speeches at the funeral being
encomia -- de mortuis nil nisi bonum
and all that -- but the problem is that you would be dead. An eightieth birthday bash carries with it
the suggestion that you are pretty well finished and are just putting a cap on
it.

Sunday, September 23, 2012

No matter how firmly you vow never to say certain things to your children that your own mother or father said to you, sooner or later there comes a moment, after a long hard day, when, exhausted and exasperated, out of your mouth comes your father's voice, yelling "If you don't eat that oatmeal I am going to rub it in your hair!" Stress reveals who we really are in a way that prepared presentations never can.

I think we may assume that after several weeks of excoriating criticism from the talking heads and opinion makers of the Republican Party, the inner circle of the Romney campaign is experiencing an uncommon level of stress. So it is that recent outbursts like that of Ann Romney give us some insight into the true character of the candidate and his wife. ["Stop it. This is hard. You want to try it? Get in the ring. This is hard and, you know, it's an important thing that we're doing right now and it's an important election and it is time for all Americans to realize how significant this election is and how lucky we are to have someone with Mitt's qualifications and experience and know-how to be able to have the opportunity to run this country."]

I suspect Romney and his wife really believe that America is lucky to have him, so that if the little folks ["You people," as she has addressed them on occasion] would just realize that, and understand how many millions of dollars Mitt is foregoing to offer himself selflessly to America, they would just shut up and vote Republican.

Saturday, September 22, 2012

One of the standard action
film clichés that
really bugs me is the scene in which the hero and the heroine are shown, in
slow motion, running away from an explosion.Every time I see that, I think, "That is nonsense.An explosion expands much faster than anyone
can run."But of course I don't know that, so I just grumble a bit to
myself and go on watching.This morning,
during my regular four mile walk, I started thinking about this, for some
bizarre reason, so when I got home, I turned to Google.As always, Google did not disappoint.Here is a passage from a site I found,
athttp://express.howstuffworks.com/explosion.htm.

"Can you really
outrun an explosion, like Sydney does every other week on "Alias"?Let's go to the starting
blocks: Sydney vs. chunk of C-4 explosive.

(There is a picture here, but I cannot figure out how to upload it, so just imagine it.)

Let's say
Sydney can sprint at about 15 miles per hour, or 22 feet per second. If we give
her a 10-foot head start to get to top speed, she'll be 32 feet away from the
center of the blast one second after the C-4 detonates. Not too shabby, but
it's not nearly fast enough. A C-4 explosion will expand at a rate of 26,400
feet per second. In other words, the blast is so fast it's almost
instantaneous. If she were in range of the explosion, she wouldn't have time to
think about running - or anything else. "

Never mind Alias, which I have never watched [so I
don't know whom Sydney is].Isn't this
cool?

Thursday, September 20, 2012

A year ago, I posted a comment called "The Shadow." It came to mind as I contemplated the disaster that the Romney campaign has become in the past several weeks. I should like to re-post that old comment today, because I think it contains the secret to Obasma's current success in the polls, as well as a clue to how the first debate, on October 3rd, is likely to go. Here is the old post:

"A meme has been replicating itself in
cyberspace concerning President Obama. It is said that he has a mysterious
ability to get his enemies to self-destruct. I have been thinking about this for
a bit, and I believe I can throw some light on this strange power. But first, a
trip down memory lane.

When I was a boy, I listened faithfully to a
radio show called "The Shadow." The central character was a gentleman crime
fighter named Lamont Cranston who, it was said, had acquired, during his travels
in the Orient, the "strange power to cloud men's minds" and thereby render
himself invisible. [Obi Wan Kenobe, in the original Star Wars movie, has a
similar power, as he reveals when he and Luke go to town to hire a freighter to
take them to Alderan. Am I recalling this correctly?] Each episode of The Shadow
would begin with a sepulchral-voiced announcer intoning, "Who knows what evil
lurks in the minds of men? The Shadow knows." The always indispensable Wikipedia
tells me that in the earliest years of the radio show, before I began to listen,
Lamont Cranston was actually played by a young Orson Welles.

Now, to
Obama. I begin with a crucial observation about the character of the political
climate in the United States in the last twenty years or so. For a variety of
reasons, some of which I have discussed here in the past, a sizable fragment of
the American electorate has become viscerally convinced that no Democrat,
regardless of the election results, is or could be a legitimate President of the
United States. These are people who feel very deeply that the America they think
they grew up in has been lost, and that they are being ruled, dominated,
betrayed by foreigners, aliens, people who are "not American." They thought this
about Bill Clinton, about John Kerry, about Hilary Clinton, about Joe Biden, and
about anyone else who might put himself or herself forward as a candidate of the
Democratic Party. The election to the Presidency of a Black man with a strange
name who had spent part of his youth growing up in the Far East simply confirmed
their worst fears, and has driven them clinically insane.

One of the
consequences of this development, coupled with the new world of multi-media and
cable television, has been a transformation of what passes for a public
conversation in this country. The standard image of that public conversation
now, replicated daily, is of angry talking heads in matching screens, shouting
at one another, talking over one another, wrestling verbally for control of a
few seconds of airtime. I respond to this in the way that many people do, I
imagine, by feeling as though I am being assaulted. The talking heads all seem
to be pushing air at me, as though by the sheer force of their voices they could
reach out of the screen, grab me by the throat, and force me to accede to their
point of view.

Now, good old Marshal McLuhan, the Canadian literary and
cultural critic, had it basically right when he said "the medium is the
message." [Or, as Aristotle would have put it, had he seen television, form
dominates content.] It does not matter that in these shouting matches one person
is saying reasonable, albeit debatable, things and the other is saying things
that are just batshit crazy. The format defines the situation as one of
rhetorical equality. As one of the speakers raises his or her voice, the other
responds in an effort not to be drowned out, and no matter how hard we try when
we are watching, it is impossible not to feel, at some level, that they are
equivalent.

What happens when one side won't play? Call the two parties
the shouter and the debater. What is the effect when the debater will not become
a shouter, will not raise his or her voice, push air, make more and more
un-nuanced assertions to balance the un-nuanced assertions from the shouter?
Refuses to get angry? There is an interesting and complex effect. First of all,
the partisans of the shouter see the shouter as winning the encounter, and so
they cheer to the echo. The shouter, frustrated by the seemingly wimpy, flaccid
unresponsiveness of the debater, and emboldened by the cheers of the fans, makes
more and more outrageous statements, almost taunting the debater, seeing what he
or she can get away with. The debater remains calm, quiet, reasonable, refusing
to interrupt, to respond angrily, to become accusatory. The debater's supporters
become frustrated at their champion's failure to give as good as he is getting,
and they demand that he take the fight to the enemy, even, in their frustration,
threatening to find another champion. The debater remains poised, unflappable,
unmoved by these demands from his supporters. Meanwhile, as the shouter grows
louder, more extreme, more uncompromising, the rather large group of lookers-on
who are partisans of neither side become uncomfortable with the sheer assaultive
noise of the shouter, and feel increasingly comfortable with the debater. It
would be a mistake to suppose that the debater has won them over by the logic of
his arguments. They aren't listening that carefully. They simply feel more
comfortable with him.

This, I suggest is most -- but not yet all -- of
what is going on right now in the public arena of American politics. But
everything is complicated by the fact that Barack Obama is Black. Deeply rooted
in the very being of White America is the image of the angry Black man, the
menacing Black man, the mugger, the rebellious slave, the rapist, The Other.
However much White America may congratulate itself on the extraordinary
generosity and liberality of its open-mindedness in electing a Black man to the
Presidency, that dark, frightening image remains. If the Republicans ever
succeed in making Obama angry, they win. It won't matter what he is angry about,
or how justified his anger. He will become The Angry Black Man, and they will
win.

Does Obama understand this? Can Geico save you fifteen percent or
more on your car insurance? [Local reference, for my overseas readers.] Of
course he understands it. Every Black man in American understands this, whether
he chooses to talk about it or not, and regardless of how he deals with it.

These ruminations are prompted by Rick Perry's veiled threat to lynch
Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke. It was an unconscionable statement, made by Perry
deliberately for effect, and it triggered an eruption of outrage. Obama happened
to be giving a one-on-one television interview, and was asked about it. His
reply was pitch perfect. "He has only been running for president for a few days.
I think we ought to cut him some slack." It reminded me of a televised moment,
during the 2008 campaign. Obama was speaking to a large outdoor audience
somewhere, and he brought up some of the attacks that had been directed at him.
With a grace that would have done credit to Cary Grant, he lightly brushed an
invisible speck of lint from the shoulder of his suit jacket. The crowd roared.
It was the coolest thing I have ever seen a candidate do.

Now, none of
this has anything to do with actual policies. But purely at the level of style,
I think it is a profound mistake to criticize Obama for not throwing his base
some rhetorical red meat. I repeat: if he gets angry, they win."

I predict that Romney, egged on by his partisans and desperate to score a knock-out punch that will put him back in the race, will attack Obama in the first debate frontally, violently, perhaps even outrageously. Progressive Democrats, hungry for blood, will hope against hope that Obama punches back, and they will be disappointed. Obama will remain aloof, calm, balanced, unflappable. And he will win the debate, simply by not getting angry.

I will say one more time what I said a year ago: If he gets angry, they win. He knows that, and he won't take the bait.

Wednesday, September 19, 2012

Last Saturday, I sent out a large mailing for my scholarship organization, University Scholarships for South African Students, containing my annual appeal for funds. Today, a batch came back, with a bar code printed on the bottom of the envelope and then crossed out, but no indication of wrong address, or address moved, or addressee deceased [I get a distressing number of those, as my funders age and pass on to their reward.] One of the letters was sent to my sister. Now I know that her address is correct and that she has neither moved nor died, so I hopped in the car and went to the post office to find out what is going on.

It seems that the post office now has a machine that automatically reads zip codes and sorts the mail accordingly. It reads from the bottom of the envelope up. As it happens, this time around, the addresses I had merge printed onto the envelopes were situated a bit high up and, since I have a logo consisting of an outline of the continent of Africa above the return address, the machine was reading the return zip code rather than the addressee's zip code, and was returning the envelopes to me!

The only solution is to throw out the hundred or so envelopes I have remaining and have the print shop do a new run of envelopes on which the logo is moved below the return address. That will ensure that the addressee zip code is read first, and all will be well.

I think I would like to return to the time when you handed a letter to a chap on a pony and he rode off into the sunset to deliver it. All that remains of that storied era is the Wells Fargo bank branch across the street.

There has been a good deal of speculation about the hour-long video that has surfaced of the now truly infamous supposedly private Mitt Romney speech to $50,000 a plate donors. [I use the adjective "infamous" in its proper meaning, "detestable or shamefully malign," not in its current misusage as simply "widely known."] Present in the room were Romney, the fat cats, and servants scurrying about bringing the food and clearing the dirty plates. The angle of the video makes it clear that it was not recorded by one of the guests, so we can only conclude that one of the wait staff managed to set up a camera and film the proceedings.Upper classes always ignore the presence of their servants, a fact that gave rise to an entire genre of eighteenth century French comedy. [Think "The Marriage of Figaro" without the immortal music.] Despite all the evidence to the contrary, they seem constitutionally incapable of remembering that the working class is populated by actual human beings with eyes and ears and fully functional intelligence. This failure is ideological, not personal, in nature. Were the rich and powerful of the world to acknowledge the full humanity of those they exploit, they would find it difficult to sustain the easy air of superiority that they consider their birthright.I had a personal experience of this ancient truth more than twenty-five years ago in Johannesburg. I had gone to South Africa for six weeks to lecture to the second year Philosophy majors at the University of the Witwatersrand on the thought of Karl Marx, a subject that had never until then been included in the undergraduate Philosophy curriculum. The Chair of the Philosophy Department in those days was Jonathan Susman, nephew of the famous anti-apartheid activist and member of Parliament Helen Susman. Jonathan invited me to join him for dinner at an old and very exclusive Johannesburg men's club. I rented a tux [one of only four times in my life that I have worn a monkey suit] and joined him for a private dinner with, among others, the editor of one of the leading newspapers, an executive of a major bank, and the CEO of a mining company.I was, to put it as gently as I can, a bit out of my element. [The chap sitting next to me, in an effort to be friendly, turned to me at one point and asked, "Well, Bob, are you a club man?" meaning, I suppose, did I belong to an American counterpart of this men's club. I allowed as how I was not.] A good deal of the conversation concerned a bombing raid that the South African air force had launched against suspected anti-apartheid rebel forces in Zimbabwe. [This was well before Nelson Mandela and his colleagues were released from Robben Island], about which the newspaper editor had some inside information.As the men chatted, silent waiters moved about the room, serving us. I sat there and wondered which of them was taking note of everything that was said and reporting it back to associates of the armed struggle inside South Africa. My dinner hosts seemed blithely unaware that this could even be a possibility.At Romney's rich donor dinner, it is a virtual certainty that the wait staff consisted of men [and perhaps women -- one cannot tell from the video] who make too little money to pay federal income taxes, and hence are among the 47% whom Romney says are dependent moochers who cannot take personal responsibility for their lives. These people were obviously in full view of Romney as he stood at the podium and spoke for more than an hour. The fact that it obviously never occurred to him that he was talking about people present in the room says more about Romney than any formal biography or hatchet job expose possibly can.

Tuesday, September 18, 2012

Some truths are so
important that they bear repeating.One
such truth is that for as long as the Republic has existed, the key to an understanding
of American politics has been race.This truth was once again borne in upon me by
the extraordinary video that has surfaced of Mitt Romney's impromptu talk to a
closed meeting of fat cat Republican donors.[A second, subordinate, truth of contemporary American public life is
that everything, without exception, has been captured on a handheld device by
somebody or other and can be counted on to surface when least convenient.]

Romney's surreptitiously
recorded speech is widely viewed, on the right as well as on the left, as
having put paid to any lingering dreams the Republicans might have had of
winning the election.As Tallyrand is
reputed to have said about Napoleon's murder of the duc d'Enghien, it was worse
than a crime, it was a blunder.What can
Romney have been thinking when he casually dismissed 47% of Americans as
free-loading moochers incapable of caring for themselves and slavishly beholden
to Democrats throwing them slops?Never
mind that Romney had his facts completely wrong.I think we have become accustomed to
that.But in the midst of an election
that he is currently losing, what can have possessed him to speak
condescendingly and contemptuously of a tad less than half of the American
electorate?

The answer, as always, is
race.Let me repeat what I have written
here before.Both before and after the
Civil War, poor whites in the South and also in the North, bemired in a
socially and economically disadvantaged position in American society, consoled
themselves with the thought that however poor they were, however much they were
disrespected by their wealthier and socially more prominent betters, at least they were not Black!In both the North and the South, here was a
permanent underclass toward whom they could show disdain, whom they could
discriminate against, and on occasion whom they could lynch with impunity.That structural fact of American life was
written into the Black Codes -- laws that reinstituted de facto servitudeafter the
end of formal, legal slavery; it was written into Jim Crow, into the
exclusionary racial covenants that kept Black families trapped in ghettoes, into
the racial quotas at Northern colleges, and into the devil's compact between
employers and White labor unions that kept former slaves from any chance of
securing good industrial jobs.

The success of the Civil
Rights Movement in ending Jim Crow, in breaking down the barriers to
employment, and in winning the vote for Black citizens deprived poor Whites of
their only consolation for their disadvantaged condition, and they reacted with
anger, bitterness, and a deep sense of betrayal.It is the bitter residue of this ressentiment that explains the tenacity
with which poor and lower middle class Whites vote against their economic
interest by supporting Republican candidates whose policies sink them ever
deeper into economic despair.

Mitt Romney knew what he
was saying when he described 47% of Americans as takers, moochers,
free-loaders.He was talking about Black
and Brown Americans, and he was talking to White America.The numbers do not matter, nor do the
facts.What mattered was a desperate
attempt to tap into that deep well of bitterness and try to transform it into a
winning coalition of White voters.

Happily, he will
fail.But he is not a fool, and what he
did was not in fact a blunder.It was
one last resurrection of Richard Nixon's Southern Strategy.

There was a young man in
my Harvard College class ['54] who really got on everyone's nerves.His name was David Shapiro.He was absolutely brilliant, and picture book
handsome.But what really got under our
skins was the fact that he was really, really a nice guy.It didn't seem fair, somehow.Sort of like Angelina Jolie, who in addition
to being the most gorgeous woman in the world is also a committed activist for
humanitarian causes.I mean, why couldn't
she just marry famous men, like Marilyn Monroe?

The French have a lovely
phrase for this phenomenon.They call it
an embarras de richesses.That must be the way the Obama campaign feels
this morning.The video of Mitt Romney's
despicable comments to a closed door meeting of rich donors, coming on top of
his ill-considered comments about the violence in Libya and Egypt, which in
turn followed Clint Eastwood's world-class comedy routine at the Republican
Convention, must leave the Obama campaign ad planners at a loss to know which disaster
to feature in their thirty second spots.Truly, an embarras de richesses.

Shapiro, by the way,
after marrying a lovely woman whom I dated briefly, went on to become a
distinguished Harvard Law professor, a leading expert on Civil Procedure who
has, on occasion, generously offered support and encouragement to my son,
Tobias, whose field is also Civil Procedure.For that, I can forgive him anything.

Friday, September 14, 2012

This has been a big week for me at Bennett College. I have been driving the 50 miles to Greensboro every day [I leave once again in an hour], visiting classes with my research expert, Ms. Dania Francis, who is being paid on the Spencer Foundation grant I was able to secure. Dania is a brilliant young woman -- graduated from Smith College at nineteen, went to Harvard to do Economics and did not take to that rather odd environment, left Academia for a while, and is now about to get her doctorate in Public Policy at Duke University. Dania lives in Boston with her husband and her tiny baby, Sloan. Her dissertation director at Duke is William "Sandy" Garrity, Jr.

Sandy Garrity's father was William Garrity Sr, the founding Dean at UMass of the School of Health Sciences. Bill Garrity was one of a small band of African-American scholars and administrators who for decades served as an informal network of support for the Black students who found their way to UMass. When I joined the UMass Afro-American Studies Department, after twenty-one years on the campus in the Philosophy Department, I learned of this community within the commuinity for the first time. It was one of the many things I learned about UMass by changing departments.

While Dania was on the Bennett Campus, I took her in to meet Esther Terry, my former Chair of Afro-American Studies at UMass and now the Interim President of Bennett. Esther, of course, was an old and very good friend of the Garritys, and she greeted Dania warmly, in effect welcoming her into that circle. The next day, Dania had a meeting wtih Sandy Garrity at Duke about her dissertation, and when we met later that day at Bennett, she said that she had told him about meeting Esther.

"I think she used to baby-sit me," this distinguished senior Duke professor said.

Thursday, September 13, 2012

All of you, I am sure,
are aware of public opinion surveys showing that astonishing numbers of
Americans believe mindlessly stupid things.A recent Gallup Poll, for example, tells us that 46% of Americans believe
that the earth was created ten thousand years ago.These same people blithely answer
"yes" when asked whether dinosaurs and humans walked the earth
together.What are we to make of
information like this?

One natural response is to
conclude that there are well over one hundred million ignorant, dead stupid
Americans.I am not aware of ever having
had a conversation with one of these folks, but since, like all sensible
people, I trust Gallup implicitly, I can only infer that I have thus far led a
charmed life.People who are this
appallingly ignorant of the simplest facts of natural science, one would think,
ought to be unable to function at even a minimally effective level in the
modern world.If they really believe the
world was created ten thousand years ago, what sense can they make of the solar
system, of computers, of the internal combustion engine, indeed of a vacuum
cleaner?Do they refuse to fly, fearing
that the airplane will fall out of the sky?Do they, on entering an elevator, look about anxiously to see whether
the elevator slaves are ready to haul on the cables and raise the car?Do they, each time they flip a light switch,
step back to avoid the flare of the match as secret candles are lit?

I have been brooding on
these and similar questions, and I have an alternative hypothesis.Mind you, I have no direct confirmatory
evidence for this hypothesis, so let us label it armchair speculation.I offer it for your consideration, purely as
what physicists call a gedankenexperiment,
or thought experiment.

I have a suspicion that
when a Gallup pollster asks these folks "Do you believe that the world was
created in its present form ten thousand years ago?", what the respondents
really hear is a lengthy and very complex question that goes something like
this:

"In America today
there is a sizeable minority of adults who have Bachelor's Degrees or more from
good schools, who hold cushy jobs with nice salaries in comfortable offices,
who live in upscale communities like Chapel Hill and Shaker Heights and Cambridge
and Hyde Park, who expect to be, and are, accorded respect and deference in
restaurants, doctor's offices, airline lounges, and bank lobbies, and whose
cultural preferences are echoed on television and in magazines.These people look down with a genial
condescension on people like you.They
do not share your religious affiliations nor do they really respect them,
though they may pay lip service to the notion that all religions are to be
accorded superficial courtesy.And they
would not be caught dead in the neighborhood in which you live or at the events
where you amuse yourself.Now, do you
accept the fact that you are among the disrespected, the condescended to, the
left out, the social, intellectual, and cultural underclass of America?Are you prepared to tug your forelock or
touch your cap in acknowledgement of your inferior status? Of course, I am not going to ask you this question
directly.Instead, I am going to ask you
whether you think God created the world in its present form ten thousand years
ago.But you and I understand that this
is really a shorthand code version of the longer question, and I quite well
realize that if you answer my little question 'yes' you are really answering my
longer question 'no!' "

That is what I think is going
on when we get these bizarre poll results.Looked at this way, the responses make sense, and are, I might even
suggest, honorable.If we want to reduce
the number of people who say the world was created ten thousand years ago, we
will be wasting our time pushing for better science courses in high
school.What we really need to do is to
break down the class barriers and wealth and income inequality in American
society.But that, I am afraid, is a
very much larger project.

Wednesday, September 12, 2012

On September 6th, after I
bemoaned the lack of things to blog about, Chris asked me whether I might do a
tutorial on Volume III of CAPITAL.I
responded with a post on the 10th briefly explaining why I did not think it
would be much fun, and Chris immediately took exception to my explanation,
citing and giving links to videos of lectures by Andrew Kliman, as well as to
some publications.I am currently very
busy with my Bennett project, and I simply do not have the time to watch the
videos from start to finish and read the works referenced, so that I can give a
serious reply.But it seems to me I owe
Chris some answer, however fragmentary, so here goes.

As I suspected, Kliman is
a student or follower of Richard Wolff and Steven Resnick, both of them old
friends of mine from the UMass Economics Department.Rick and Steve have for more than thirty
years been developing and teaching a systematic interpretation of Marx's economic
theories.In true academic fashion, they
have published books and articles, trained students, organized annual conferences, started a journal, and
done all the other things that we do in the Academy to advance our views.I have enormous respect both for their work
and for their dedication and energy, even though I do not agree with them about
a number of things.Our specific
disagreement over the so-called Transformation Problem is rather technical, but
at the risk of losing everyone but Chris, I will spend a few paragraphs
explaining what is at stake.

I have argued in my
published writings on Marx and also on this blog that in CAPITAL, Volume I,
Marx assumes equal organic composition of capital, only relaxing this
assumption in Volumes II and III.Since
Ricardo's version of the Labor Theory of Value is correct only under this
severe constraint [as Ricardo himself was aware], this assumption allows Marx
to focus on what he considers the more fundamental question that Ricardo cannot
answer even in the special case in which his theory is true, namely why there
is a positive rate of profit in a capitalist economy.Marx then introduces his distinction between
labor and labor power to solve the problem, demonstrating thereby that
capitalism rests essentially on the exploitation of the working class.

Mathematically speaking,
the arguments by which the various propositions of Volume I are demonstrated --
at least on my interpretation of the book -- presuppose that competition
establishes a uniform rate of profit throughout the economy.It is this assumption that yields the
conclusion that input and output prices are identical for a given
commodity.This way of analyzing things,
which Kliman correctly labels a "simultaneous" approach, is widely
adopted in the large international literature written by contemporary
mathematical economists interested in casting Marx's arguments in modern
dress.I am a big fan of this approach.

However, there is an
alternative way of reading Volume I.If
you give up the assumption that competition equilibrates the system by
establishing a single economy-wide profit rate, then you can represent Marx's
analysis as approaching such a uniform profit rate over time by way of a series
of adjustments on the part of capitalists to the information presented by the
market.In that analysis, input and
output prices are not identical.This is not a simultaneous analysis, but a
temporal analysis.

But I believe that the
end result of these two modes of analysis is the same.The same relationships emerge between labor
values and prices, and the same divergences of prices from labor values appear,
which must be explained and analyzed by the same arguments that Marx invokes in
Volume III.So I do not see how adopting
Kliman's approach alters, in the end, our understanding either of capitalist
economies or of Marx's text.

The second question, on
which I am afraid I have nothing at all to say, is the dispute over Marx's
claim that there is a tendency for the rate of profit to fall as more capital
intensive techniques are introduced.I
would have to read, or else watch on video, Kliman's analysis of that dispute,
and I just have not done so yet.

Chris, I hope this at
least demonstrates that I take your comments seriously, even if I am not now in
a position to respond to them fully.

Tuesday, September 11, 2012

When I was a boy, the gold standard in choruses was the 360
member Mormon Tabernacle Choir.This
was, as the name suggests, the choir of the Mormon Tabernacle in Salt Lake
City, Utah, and it seemed to consist of every able-bodied non-tone-deaf Mormon
within a one hundred mile radius of the Tabernacle.Pictures of the choir [no television in those
days] showed banks upon banks of sopranos, altos, tenors, and basses, standing
on risers that seemed, like Jacob's Ladder, to ascend to the heavens.Although the choir clearly equated numbers
with musical power, it was a rather odd fact that as a musical group, they did
not make that joyous a noise.Rather,
they produced a muddy, indistinct sound that seemed to be coming from a
cathedral bedeviled by inconvenient echoes.

This odd contradiction between the sheer size of the choir
and its rather mediocre musical power was a consequence of a simple fact about
the generation of sound waves familiar to anyone who has ever sat in front of
an old monitor watching a sine wave rise and fall across the screen.Sound, of course, is generated by the
agitation of the gas particles in the air.It travels in a series of expansions and contractions that are nicely
visualized by those old sine waves.When
you add a second sine wave to the first, it can either match the first
perfectly, in which case the combination is augmented by the addition of the
two magnitudes, or it can conflict with the first, in which case the
interference of the two waves diminishes the combined sound.The Mormon Tabernacle singers, numbered
though they were in the hundreds, were not, if the truth be told, very good
singers.They did not all sing on key
[or even, or so it seemed to me, in the same key], and their entrances and
exits were ragged.As a result, the
sound waves generated by their vibrating uvulae interfered with one another,
producing what I can only describe as a brown sound.

The truth of this observation was brought home to me powerfully
one evening in the late 40's [I was still in high school] when I attended a
concert at Town Hall in Manhattan by the newly formed Robert Shaw Chorale.Shaw was a dynamic young conductor with
radically new ideas about what a professional chorus ought to be.When the Chorale came out on stage, I was
astonished to see that there were no more than twenty or so of them.I was sitting in the peanut gallery, of
course, and I began to worry about whether I would be able to hear them.The singers, all hand-picked professionals,
did not group themselves into sections -- sopranos, altos, tenors, basses -- as
was the universal practice at that time.Instead, they lined up in several ranks
man-woman-man-woman-man-woman.What is more,
instead of being bunched tightly together so that each one's left shoulder
seemed welded to the next right shoulder, they spaced themselves perhaps two or three feet
from one another.It was clear that Shaw
had some very unorthodox ideas about choral singing.

When they opened their mouths to sing the first notes of the
first composition, a blast of sound filled Town Hall, as audible to me near the
back of the second balcony as it must have been to the toffs in the expensive
seats in the orchestra section.The
reason for this astonishing power, of course, was that the singers were all
perfectly in tune and perfectly synchronized with one another.Their spacing, which succeeded brilliantly in
blending the different voices, was made possible by the fact that it was not necessary
to group all the sopranos near the one or two of their section who could be
counted on to find the pitch at an entrance or pick up a conductor's cue.Compare, if you will, the playing of a fine string quartet with that of a mediocre
orchestra.

These thoughts crossed my mind this morning as I reflected
on the odd failure of Romney's super-pac multi-millions to achieve any
measurable success in the campaign against president Obama.Why, I wondered, were the vast sums of which
Democrats were so fearful having so little impact on the race?Then I thought about Shaw and the Tabernacle
Choir, and I saw what might be an answer.

The Romney campaign, it occurred to me, is suffering from
the advertising equivalent of the self-defeating interference of the sound
waves issuing from choruses like the Tabernacle Choir.The Romney campaign is producing what
psychologists, reaching for the same analogy, call cognitive dissonance.Since
North Carolina is considered a "battleground state," our television
viewing is repeatedly interrupted by political thirty second spot ads.The Romney campaign started out pillorying
Obama as Other, un-American, out of touch with American values, a Socialist [I
wish!].But that did not seem to have
any negative impact on his poll numbers, which most strikingly revealed that
Americans like the President, even when they disagree with him.Apparently cautioned by this evidence that
their efforts to make Americans fear and hate Obama were not working, the
campaign did an almost complete about face.Now, the ads feature a syrupy voice saying that although Obama is a nice
guy, he is in over his head, and unable to deal with America's problems.The effect of these two series of ads, I
thought, is rather like the effect of having the altos in a chorus singing
slightly off key or out of synch with one another.The sound waves interfere with each other,
producing a muddy sound of no great power.

The same result is produced by the campaign's constant
shifts in its positions on such issues as "pre-existing conditions"
in health care reform or a voucher system to replace Medicare.Political junkies, like music mavens, might
be able to disambiguate the conflicting messages conveyed by the Romney
campaign's ads, but the general public, like the audience at a concert of the
Mormon Tabernacle Choir, just hears a blurred sound of no particular direction
or distinction.

I think they would have had more success with a sharp,
precise, clean message, however unfamiliar to the ear.Better a good performance of Pierrot Lunaire than a blurred rendering
of the Messiah.

About Me

As I observed in one of my books, in politics I am an anarchist, in religion I am an atheist, and in economics I am a Marxist. I am also, rather more importantly, a husband, a father, a grandfather, and a violist.